Fiery atmosphere makes 2023 the Year of the Frog – 01/09/2024 – Environment

Among the 12 animals that mark the years of the Chinese calendar there is no place for batrachians, but 2023 could well be identified as the Year of the Frog: the one in which the Earth reached the climatic boiling point, after decades on the way to boiling, due to action and omission of governments and populations.

It was supposed to have jumped out of the cauldron heated by the burning of fossil fuels a long time ago. But little has been done since 1992, when the UN Convention on Climate Change was adopted at Rio-92. Humanity continues releasing CO_two in the atmosphere like there’s no tomorrow.

There is no point in claiming surprise, therefore, with the confirmation that 2023 was the hottest year ever recorded since the pre-industrial era. The air temperature on the planet’s surface was 1.48°C above average in the period 1850-1900, announces the Global Climate Highlights report, compiled by the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.

This record reached the safety threshold (1.5°C of warming) outlined by the Paris Agreement (2015). This certainly does not imply that this prudential boundary has been permanently crossed.

The Earth’s climate is subject to large interannual variations. There is no guarantee that 2024 will be hotter than 2023, or that 2025 will be hotter than 2024, and so on. It is increasingly clear, however, that international inaction is fueling an upward curve.

The previous annual peak was in 2016. Therefore, in this six-year interval between the record holders, the temperature deviated less from historical averages.

On the other hand, it is obvious that an era of sustained growth in thermometers and satellite observations has begun. Suffice it to mention that all of the ten most ardent years belong to the current decade, albeit in apparent disarray: 2023, 2016, 2020, 2019, 2015, 2017, 2022, 2021, 2018 and 2014.

Every day last year was, for the first time, at least 1°C above the 1850-1900 average. Half of them exceeded 1.5°C; two days in November exceeded 2°C, an unprecedented occurrence.

The atmospheric kettle of 2023 was on two burners of the climate stove, global warming caused by humanity with the emission of CO_two and an El Niño that occurred in the middle of the year. This abnormal warming of Pacific waters throws the climate around the globe into uproar, with extreme events such as rains in the South and droughts in the North and Northeast of Brazil.

There is more, as the Copernicus report points out. Other oceans also had their surfaces warm unusually, especially the North Atlantic. For eight months of 2023, sea ice around Antarctica was below the corresponding monthly minimums; the overall record for shrinkage occurred last February.

Not by chance, the concentration of CO_two, the main greenhouse gas, continued to rise, this time linearly (except for the seasonal variation observed each year). The mark of 419 ppm (parts per million) was reached, the highest in 100 thousand years. In 2005, it was around 375 ppm; in the pre-industrial era, 280 ppm.

Once emitted, carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for centuries, with half of it absorbed in about 120 years. Every ton emitted today — and there are around 37 billion of them released each year — will continue to disrupt the climate that our grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren will have to deal with…

To comply with Paris, carbon emissions, mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels (oil, coal and natural gas), need to be reduced by 43% by 2030 — in six years, therefore. And then completely eliminated by 2050, or at least neutralized, if the promised technologies for removing carbon from the atmosphere take off by then.

To avoid the imperative reduction, the fossil industry clings to the chimeras of carbon capture and storage, natural gas as a transition fuel (it emits less CO_two per unit of energy produced than oil and coal) and oil income to finance the energy revolution. They will do everything they can to get the most out of the ground before the inevitable restrictions materialize.

If they do so, as Petrobras plans on the Brazilian equatorial margin, it will be the equivalent of businesspeople selling all of the company’s shares when its insolvency becomes unappealable. In the fossil sector, deposits that cannot be explored are called stranded assets.

Nations are not companies, just as governments are not their boards. Leaders who claim to be statesmen should see beyond the 4 or 8 year horizon of electoral cycles, resisting pressure from investors, bureaucrats, corporatists and blackmailers.

In this sense, it is a bad sign that the next climate summit, COP29, in Baku (Azerbaijan), will be chaired by Mukhtar Babayev, Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources who spent his career in that country’s state-owned oil company. COP28, in Dubai (United Arab Emirates), was led by an oil executive, Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, and it did what it did — nothing that makes a difference.

The next meeting, COP30, will be in Belém (PA). There, on the mouth of the Amazon River, on the other side of the island of Marajó, not that far away, in Amazonian terms, from the oil and gas deposits that Petrobras wants because it wants to explore. There will be no shortage of frogs in the surrounding area.